


god is dead and the war has begun

by bessemerprocess



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Everyone is Dead, Gen, Infinity War spoilers, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Shuri (Marvel) Lives, Shuri is Black Panther, Shuri is the actual facts only adult up in this place, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers jumps out of planes, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Stark is broken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-23
Updated: 2018-05-23
Packaged: 2019-05-12 23:48:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14738108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bessemerprocess/pseuds/bessemerprocess
Summary: INFINITY WAR SPOILERS***After everything, there are still villains, and someone has to deal with them. Shuri just hadn't figured it would be up to her.





	god is dead and the war has begun

**Author's Note:**

> Seriously, all the spoilers are contained here in. Don't say I didn't warn you.

If Shuri had for some reason decided to kill half the population of the universe, she would’ve made damn sure to take out all the supervillains. She hopes she would’ve spared a thought for logistics chains and how the survivors were going to feed themselves and such, too, but she would’ve definitely killed all the bad guys. 

She should be mourning. She should be sobbing for her brother, wrapped up in her mother’s arms right now, but she doesn’t have time for that. She is the uncrowned queen, and she is the Black Panther, and there is no heart shaped herb to make her faster or stronger or need less sleep anymore. And damn Erik Killmonger for that. 

Thanos may have taken her brother, taken flying Sam and gentle, broken Bucky, but he had left Hydra, left AIM, left evil. And in the chaos of a world where trucker drivers and electrical plant operators and garbage men had all disappeared, evil flourished. 

Five days after Thanos destroys her life, the bifrost slams down in the middle of her lab, with Thor cradling Tony’s bloodied body. He’s limp and unresponsive as they move him to her work table. The last person on that table had been Vision, and Shuri hesitates for the barest of instants before she gets to work. 

“He was stabbed. We were stranded and he built a ship out of nothing, but it kept breaking.” The woman talking is blue, and any other time Shuri would be fascinated, but Tony is doing his best to die on her. 

He’d sprayed nanoparticles into his body at some point and there is more radiation exposure than is good for anyone. He’s cut and bruised, covered in tiny electrical burns and half his rib cage is broken. There are fractures on top of fractures. She’s not sure how he’s alive at all. But he is and she’s going to keep him that way. 

In the background, the blue lady tells Thor that everyone else with them died or was unraveled, unmade. That Tony hadn’t spoken to her in days, had just worked unceasingly, muttering to himself, as the ship tried to kill them both. 

It takes a week of Tony almost dying, a week of Steve Rogers haunting the corners of her lab, looking almost as dead, before she gets Tony stable and conscious. It might have gone faster if people hadn’t kept making her govern, or possibly if she had been willing to delegate. 

It’s three in the morning when he finally wakes up. She’s the only one in the lab. There’s just not enough time for everything she has to do, and so she’s living on coffee and cat naps and stolen time. Her people, decimated as they are, have the technology to make up for some of their population loss. Most of the rest of the planet doesn’t. 

She’s working on automated systems to keep farms who have lost half their workforce running when Tony starts screaming. 

“Shhh,” she murmurs as she works, making sure he isn’t about to crash or in excessive pain. “You’re okay. You’re back on Earth. You’re in Wakanda.”

“Who?” he asks, and she knows he isn’t asking who she is. 

“Of your people, Captain America, Black Widow, Bruce Banner, Thor and Col. Rhodes survived,” she says. It’s easier to list those who are alive when so many have been lost. 

“T’Challa?”

“I am queen, now,” she says. She cannot bear to confirm her brother’s death. 

***

“Tony,” Rhodey says, low and soft over the vid screen, “Pepper and Happy, they didn’t make it.”

Shuri watches as Tony crumples, and wishes Thanos dead and undone for the millionth time. 

***

“Shuri, we need you in the throne room,” Okoye yells across the kimoyo beads. Shuri knows that tone, knows it's going to be bad news, and runs. Tony follows. 

When they get there, it’s to find Okoye cradling one of her war dogs. The man is bloodied, battered and barely breathing. 

“Doom is coming,” the war dog whispers. He breathes once more, but not again.

“Well, shit,” Tony says. 

Shuri cleared Tony to leave the lab three days ago, but he hadn’t left. She’d always planned on teasing Tony Stark about his old fashioned technology when they me. She’d planned on dazzling him with what she could do, what Wakanda could do. Now, she spends her time with him when she can, teaching him the ways of Wakandan technology, just to see the tiniest glimmers of wonder in his eyes. Anything is better than the death she sees there. 

Tony won’t feed himself, hasn’t taken a shower in too long, and still has enough healing burns on his hands that holding anything should be agony. He talks to himself, drinks more coffee than any human should be able to survive, and builds her an AI anyway. 

“You need the help if we’re going to take on Doom,” Tony says.

Shuri may not have the heart shape herb, but she has been building the Black Panther suit since she was thirteen. And, as much as she hates to admit it, she has Tony Stark and his wealth of experience building suits for people without powers. She wrangles the tech and he reminds her that her unenhanced body needs to survive being inside of it. 

“I called Natasha and Bruce,” Steve says, talking for the first time Shuri’s heard in Tony’s presence. He’s been sticking to the shadows, and Tony startles at his voice. “They’re dealing with a Hydra problem in Oregon of all places.”

Tony stares at Steve, and Shuri just shakes her head at these white boys. Trust them to consider keeping this stupid feud going even in the midst of 4.1 billion dead people. 

She kicks Tony in the ankle, and he rolls his eyes at her. 

“Fine, the teenager is going to make me adult,” Tony says. “For the purpose of stopping Doctor Doom, I’ll work with him.”

“Say that to him,” Shuri says, and wonders how these two idiots are worse than her little cousins. 

“Come on, Rogers, lets got stop some bad guys,” Tony says, this time looking at Steve.

“Yeah, let's do that, Stark,” Steve says with a slowly spreading smile. 

Maybe they couldn’t stop Thanos with the power of the universe’s creation behind him, but Doctor Doom is more or less human, and they’ve got a lot of repressed anger on their side. 

Tony’s probably not getting in a suit anytime soon, for all that it’s his trademark. He’s the most broken of her little band of shattered white boys. He haunts her labs, designing safety feature after safety feature for her suits, sitting on the other end of the comm line when she goes out to fight. 

The plan is simple, Tony runs comms, and Shuri and Steve sneak in and stop Doom before he can even come to Wakanda. She risks Latveria declaring war on Wakanda if they are caught, but Doom is already coming to war on Wakanda, so what difference does it make? 

“Ihlosi,” Shuri says to the AI that she and Tony integrated into the Black Panther armor she built for herself, “let’s do this thing.”

She jumps out of the plane, and Captain America follows.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I just want all the Shuri as Black Panther, being the only actual adult in the room. 
> 
> Also, Ihlosi is the isiKhosa name for the serval, a medium sized wild cat native to Sub-Saharan Africa.


End file.
